Collective Chaos: A Roller Derby Team Memoir

By Samantha Tucker and Amy Spears

A view into the continuing evolution of the niche-yet-global sport through the historical lens of Ohio Roller Derby, one of the founding leagues of the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association

Part sports autobiography, part cultural critique, this book offers the collective experience of a tenacious group of nontraditional athletes who play, officiate, plan, schedule, market, and manage the business of a (mostly) women’s amateur sports team.

This modern sport, with its alternative, punk rock culture, is often a place for those who’ve struggled within the mainstream. But even as the sport is often home for historically marginalized groups, such as the LGBTQ+ community, roller derby organizations and participants often mirror and experience the same inequities as those in the world surrounding them. In a full-contact, theatrical sport that some consider revolutionary, the authors show that gaining truly radical self-knowledge is an ongoing, difficult process that requires love, teamwork, discipline, critical consideration of one’s local and global societies, and—above all else—one’s place and action within them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Swallow Press
• Release date: Apr 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9780804041195

Samantha Tucker

Samantha Tucker (she/her) is an antiracist teacher, writer, and editor in Columbus, Ohio. Sam writes personal essays, memoir, and cultural critique, having earned her MFA and MA in creative nonfiction. Her essay “Fountain Girls,” originally published in Ecotone, is a listed notable in Best American Essays 2017 and is anthologized in Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: An Anthology. Other essays have been published with Literary Hub, Columbus Alive, BUST, Brevity, and Guernica. In her spare time, Sam loves protest, mutual aid, roller derby, and karaoke.

Book preview

1

These United Skates

Perhaps I’ve always been on my way to Ohio, even destined to be an Ohioan. When I first got here, I thought to myself, What is Ohio? How? And also, why? But now I’ve been here near a decade and I’ve figured some things out.

For instance, if the state of Ohio were in need of a catchphrase, I’d propose:

Ohio, the America of America.

When I say Ohio is the America of America, I’m trying to capture that loyal, averagely exceptional, self-made cultural spirit of Ohio—that is, so many Ohioans are content to recognize themselves as a people with a can-do attitude, despite tread-upon realities; here, we are ever bootstrapping and overcoming, just like Americans.

Just like America. Which may, in fact, be the Ohio of the world.

Unfortunately, the state of Ohio is not in need of a catchphrase. If anything, it already suffers too many. The current welcome signs at any Ohio state border proclaim Ohio: Find It Here. This imprecise slogan was launched in 2019 to replace the early 2000s’ Ohio, So Much to Discover. Things were slightly less vague back in 1984—the year I was born in the square state of Colorado—when the Ohio Division of Tourism and Travel came up with Ohio, the Heart of It All. The reasoning behind this motto was both the location and a supposed heart-like shape of the state, though Ohio is no more a heart shape than Colorado is a triangle. In 1959, Ohioans mandated that With God, All Things Are Possible. It is unclear whether all these things are only possible in Ohio, and stop being so once in Indiana or West Virginia or Kentucky or that state up north, but I myself have uttered the phrase in the self-checkout line of an overrun Kroger, and I made it out alive. The oldest state slogan I found for this amorphous heart was made immediately after the Civil War; Imperium in Inpeno, Latin for An Empire within an Empire, was decidedly too narcissistic and individualist, too self-indulgent and self-congratulatory, for a state within a union that was attempting to put itself back together. It lasted all of two years, 1865–67. Rest in Peace, meta-empiredom.

Based on the aforementioned history of why, where, and what Ohio is or does, I will confidently say my proposed slogan-motto-catchphrase is the most accurate, most succinct, most vaguely precise of them all. Ohio is an average place, or a place of averages. Ohio, the America of America nods to the state’s enduring influence as a precise, local gauge of national political trends. It can refer to the surprising racial, economic, and cultural diversity of the Midwest state, which touts a population over 11,000,000—seventh largest in the country. It also works as a critique, offering up Ohio as a mirror of the best and worst of these United States: farmland, football, Indigenous history and Indigenous mockery, guns and fast-food testing grounds and university after university, people of every kind of community with their own take on all of it, their agreement only in that Ohio is the place to be—or it’s where they are, in any case.

Before I arrived here, I’d long been overcoming my own American variety of obstacles and impostor syndromes, handed down to me by immigrant Korean and German grandmothers, enlisted grandfathers, my single mother, my addict father, my tenacious siblings. Ours has been the kind of difficult life movie stars and athletes like to shout out as the motivation for achieving greatness, the kind of struggle people brag about once they’ve found a way to move beyond it. I could not move beyond it fast enough, and in my determination, I fully expected a return of greatness. What I got was a decade of upheaval. This is the part of the story where a montage of agony presupposes a happy ending. Spoiler alert: movie stardom or championship levels of athleticism are not in my past, present, or future. Only Ohio.

But before Ohio: I graduated high school in 2002, and went to college in my home state, though three hundred miles from my hometown. Naive idealist or great pretender that I am, I chose to use my full academic scholarship to study theater. My degree helped me act like my 20s were manageable. After graduation, I moved to New York City and planned to immediately star on Saturday Night Live. Instead, I worked three part-time jobs and when the cost of living grew higher than the limited satisfaction of struggling for my art, I moved back to Colorado in 2008. Upon my return, I lived a lifetime of years in two. My brother died. I married my college sweetheart. I tried my hand at this sport called roller derby. My body broke down, and without health insurance to support it. I worked four or five part-time jobs to get through the Great Recession.

I found no matter how many times I moved, it was never beyond struggle. In 2010, my new husband and I fled to South Korea because the American recession was simply too great. We found two years’ worth of English teaching and happiness and health insurance and adventure, something like stability. But when 2012 hit, with our 30s coming in hot, we returned to Colorado, desperate to make America happen again.¹

I’d been accepted for graduate school at Colorado State University, where I studied nonfiction so I could write about my family history and teach freshmen how to best communicate their own. I loved teaching and learning, and I wanted to make it my career. It wasn’t until halfway through my time at CSU that I learned an MA in creative writing is not enough to gain tenured, full-time professorship, but instead, more part-time, uninsured, contractual work. I would need a terminal degree if I did not want to be stuck as an undervalued adjunct instructor, though even that would not guarantee an increasingly rare gig as a college professor. I needed to know people, make connections. I needed to publish, and publish more. My husband, an artist and bartender, was content to support me in any way he could. He was calm in the face of employment uncertainties, but one of us needed to get us both health insurance, and my career impulses had seemed the attainable route.

How could I ever self-actualize if I never got to be who I’d forever been trying to be, even if that person was just someone with financial, physical, mental stability? All I’d ever been told since I was a kid was that working hard, always trying, and going to school would ensure a living wage, a decent life. When I found out more school wasn’t going to help me achieve stability in America, I defaulted to what I’d always known. I would work harder, I would keep trying, and I would get more schooling. If one graduate degree was not enough to prove me worthy or employable, I would win another one.

Like Ohio, I’ve a deep need to be recognized as special despite perceived below-average beginnings, or a desire to appear special due to the hardships I’ve supposedly moved past. If an MA couldn’t hack it, maybe a fully funded MFA would. Maybe more time to write and apply for grants would help cement the small successes I’d had as a writer, successes I worried may be flukes. I could not fathom that my need to be special, like everyone else, might never be realized, and in the ways I preferred. Ohio is America (is Ohio) because of this Rust Belt-y, not-quite-earned self-perception as the perennial underdog—an underdog who does well, even occasionally wins, who is shocked when they do, and bewildered when they find that winning is not enough to erase feeling like a loser.

I suppose I came to the state of Ohio in an Ohio-like state.

*   *   *

Upon my arrival in 2014, I was informed the school I’d attend for a second graduate degree was most accurately named THE Ohio State University. This certainly sounded like something special, though I had questions, like, Who was going to confuse OSU—over 60,000 students on 420 acres, a city unto itself—with any other university? Doesn’t an entity insisting on articled clarification as the one and only, the singular . . . doesn’t that beg mocking?²

I found Ohio as a place and a people as self-deprecating as they are proud, which describes me, in a buckeye³ nutshell. In 2016, as I entered my third and final year at THE Ohio State University, I decided I might stay in Ohio a while. Otherwise proud Ohioans seemed to generally agree that moving to Ohio was suspect. They’d insist, What are you doing here? Ohioans are deeply loyal to Ohio, the America of America, but also confused by anyone who might go out of their way to end up here. I’ve experienced Ohioans listing every single president or famous person born of the state (we all agree, Toni Morrison is the most important and exceptional Ohioan to date) before they ask me, You chose to move here? From Colorado? This, even after I’d acquired the exhaustive list of Very Important Ohioans, offered by people sporting Ohio Against the World T-shirts, as if there were a global conspiracy against a generally nice group of innocuous people.

Their disbelief, their own impostor syndrome, belies the truth of Ohio, and Columbus specifically: there is much to love in the capital city beyond affordability and averageness. There are street festivals and eclectic restaurants and an exploding brewery culture and a sick arts scene. Then there is, of course, the long list of (men’s) sports to drool over. In Ohio, sports is religion, and sports culture bursts with underdogged zealotry. Folks love pro-hockey’s Blue Jackets, the Columbus Crew soccer team, and above all else, the Scarlet and Gray. In fact, the sports teams of Ohio may best capture the competitive, fanatical nature of the state and its citizenry. In the America of America, the Cleveland Browns never win, never come within reach of the Super Bowl, but their hapless fan numbers stubbornly grow; in the Midwest, the Cavs is not only how I affectionately refer to my lower leg muscles, but also how we refer to Cleveland’s first professional sports team to win a championship in over 50 years. The Bengals recently made their first Super Bowl appearance in over 30 years. And then there’s that whole Buckeye Nation. In Ohio, the America of America, there is always someone to root for.

During my time at Ohio State, I began to suspect I wasn’t brilliant enough to be in grad school in the first place. My classmates had, as undergrads, attended Ivys, near-Ivys, and sub-Ivys before embarking on their own Midwest experience. No one had heard of my alma mater, Mesa State College,⁴ mostly because I didn’t tell anyone about it. My classmates called each other a cohort. They read my essays about familial poverty with wide eyes and little to no recognition. Their people were the kind of people who used summer as a verb, tourists who found Ohio and the middle of America charming—in an ironic way. "Being here is like being in an episode of Roseanne," someone once told me, which I somehow took personally. None of my cohort could be blamed for my insecurities but that doesn’t mean I didn’t try. When that failed to work, when I was faced with admitting they probably had their own struggles, I pivoted.

I tried to remember, What was I undeniably good at? What was it I did well? Who was I other than a graduate school fake, an arbitrarily employed phony? In a fit of inspired distraction, I dragged my red writer chair to my office closet and reached up to the highest shelf, where I’d hidden my dusty Riedell roller skates.

*   *   *

I first ventured out on quads at around four years old, those sturdy leather boot skates with thick rubber front toe stops, lengthy laces, four wheels fixed two by two. Quads are built to flow, to provide a rolling, weaving stability. I admit, my family had a brief flirtation with blades in middle school, but this was largely because everyone hooked up with those lesser-wheels for a hot ’90s second. As a kid, I associated in-line skates, blades, or ice skates with the middle and upper class, due to both cost and access. I always felt drawn to my perceived democracy of quads, emblematic of my neighborhood crew hopping cracked sidewalks on secondhand wheels, drawn to the idea that skating rink inequalities could be addressed by simply getting back up again.

My movement in roller skates always seemed less like a vehicle or mode of transportation and more like an extension of my body. Quads facilitated movement and speed I did not harness on my own wide, high-arched feet. I ran on my skates before I rolled. By six, I aimed to win my age group’s speed skate minute, an activity offered at every session, like Downtown, or Hokey Pokey. If the DJ tried to skip right to preteen or teens, I’d wipe my sweaty, crimped bangs off my forehead and shout at the booth. I’d raise my fist and insist on skating fast even if I was the only under-ten braving the slick. The disco ball, quarter lockers, arcade games, occasional laser tag, trashy snack bars—it all felt like home and set the scene for a healthy chunk of my childhood. Skating was never a sport to me, but a skill that came as naturally as breathing. This was how I preferred all I attempted in life: difficult for many, easy (in appearance) for me.

Maybe I was too dumb for this (elitist, probably) MFA degree, but I’ve always known I am brilliant at roller skating. I was in need of tangible validation. Dear, average, just right Columbus provided. Two rinks, in fact, both part of the serendipitously named chain, these United Skates of America.

I pledged immediate allegiance. Drowning in shame and self-doubt, I used my skates as a life preserver. At the rink I could avoid academia and pretentious people who use the term academia, even as I’d been brandishing the word like a parade baton days prior. I searched for a more familiar me at the United Skates of America, and there I was: under the strobe and the disco ball, glittering tassels dangling from ceiling tiles. Prince crooned I Would Die 4 U from the DJ booth speakers as I followed the confident swirl of bodies. Skaters smiled at me, a few White tattooed women who had the rockabilly look of roller derby. My Riedells, still laced with black and white, adorned with yellow leather toe guards, looked deceptively brand new. The black, white, yellow—these were the colors of the roller derby team I’d made in Colorado in 2010, a team I spent a sad total of three months on just after my brother died. Skating well did not equate to playing roller derby well.

I’d joined and quit the Pikes Peak Roller Derby in another anxiety-fueled, confusing, and sorrowful period of my life, that grief-riddled Colorado layover in between New York City and South Korea. Before Ohio, I associated the skates with one of the worst periods of my life. My expensive, top-of-the-line quads were a reminder of great pain, extreme life changes, and a shameful attempt at athleticism. Here I was, strapped back in for more rolling distraction. I find when people, even entire states, feel insignificant and lost, they begin throwing out the most arbitrary life preservers. For example, when Ohio adopted its state flag in 1902, it had already been a state for 100 years, had long since earned its moniker as Mother of Presidents. This longevity, this record of leadership, was not enough for Ohio’s ego. It was time to make a state flag unlike any other, the only state flag not rectangular in shape, but triangular, like a pennant!⁵

In reality, my reclamation of skating was not arbitrary, not some weird-shaped flag as a cry for help. It was home. When I was younger, before I knew to be ashamed of my family’s lack, the Academy Boulevard Skate City of Colorado Springs was a place anyone could find flow. There was always something egalitarian about my happy place, a pulsing Day-Glo rave on wheels, rogue, inexpensive childcare for parents, a place for poor kids, middle-class kids, and even the poor kids’ rich cousins. Skaters were Black, White, Korean, Japanese, Mexican, Puerto Rican, many ethnicities, all ages, great in our cultural differences and brought together by our love of roller skating.

Adult nights at the Columbus United Skates were no different, though the skill levels far exceeded the stumbling I remembered as a kid. Here, there were a handful of White skaters. Most kept falling down and appeared to be on terribly inept first dates. The majority of skaters in Columbus are Black. At Adult Night, 18-year-olds jammed on skates, landed handstands and high jumps, then 60-year-olds arrived and did much of the same. As folks led pulsing line dances, I sped in and out of all at high speeds, sweaty but smiling, lost in movement instead of my mind. I got caught up in the ’90s R&B, the smell of popcorn and sweat and old carpet, the optimistic shine of the skate floor. Roller skaters are my people, a we of sharp denim jeans and bright leggings, baggy band shirts or self-made crop tops, gilded fanny packs, and folded handkerchiefs to mop our collective forehead sheen. We pulsed to the beat, separate but together.

A fleeting, foolish series of thought: If the state of Ohio could go to great lengths to prove it was worthy, relevant, I could, too. Sure, I had a graduate thesis to write and defend, hundreds of theoretical pages to read a week, undergraduate papers to grade. Anxiety and writer’s block insisted there was no better way to finish my degree than by rolling on as if it were already done. Perhaps it was time for a comeback. A quick Google search would tell me if Ohio had a women’s flat track roller derby team, and maybe tryouts—

The idea alone made my back seize, my knees cry out, You stupid bitch!

I took a break in the snack bar, filled my water bottle at the incompetent water fountain, and reconsidered my reconsideration. I felt relief in my skates, my mental gymnastics dulled by how fully I dropped into my own body, into physicality and flow. Why would I undermine this reunion with myself with another inevitable failed attempt at sports and athletics?

The rink was joyful and absent the exhaustive posturing of higher education. I was looking to simplify, not complicate. This rink is where I belonged, not in a stuffy classroom with people who knew canon to be important books by important White men rather than the homonym that goes boom.

Candace Chainsaw Moser Stafford

(Credit: Candace Moser Stafford)

OHIO PLAYER PROFILE: THE TINY DICTATOR

I always hear Chainsaw before I see her, guttural cackles and staccato shrieks announcing her arrival. When she is excited, her sentences raise in volume, pitch, tempo, not unlike the way an actual chainsaw winds up, then growls out. A lot of her sentences end like this. Her sound is extroverted, and people come to know her by this projected loudness, but Chainsaw keeps her circle tight and her energy local, and she often can’t be bothered with clunky niceties. This is not personal or mean, and later, Chainsaw will say as much. It’s just—Chainsaw has no time to suffer fools. She is our current and